Startup CXO

Chapter 24Values and Culture

Driving alignment on values and culture will guide you in nearly everything you do. Your values help you find and hire the right people, reward and recognize people and behaviors, influence your organizational structure and operating system, and help you make decisions. Your values also shape the things you don't want to do, or shouldn't do: they prevent you from hiring people who don't fit your company, they guide you on the markets you'd like to enter, or ones you don't want to enter, and they frame how you select vendors and customers. Your values also influence the culture that you build.

Culture is the sum of the everyday behaviors of employees—how work gets done, how people interact with each other, and how they exemplify the values. For example, if leadership team members make every decision themselves without including others, you'll soon find that the culture of the company is one in which everyone waits for a leader to make a decision before they take action.

You may run into a CEO who just wants to build a business and isn't interested in the culture. They may believe that business takes priority over culture, that culture is just “soft stuff,” or that it doesn't add value. There's a quote attributed to Peter Drucker that “culture eats strategy for breakfast”; as Chief People Officer, it's important for you to help people understand the importance of culture to support the business strategy. I don't advocate for culture over strategy. ...